Trying to pull the latest news about Kurdistan and Kurds into one easy to follow place, if you know any more rss feeds and news sources please let me know. Linked sites and feeds are for information not in anyway a political endorsement of their contents

Saturday, 15 September 2012

Ultra Left critique of the PKK

Source CPGB

Northern Kurdistan, Rejection of Marxism

Continuing his examination of the various programmes of the Turkish and Kurdish left, Esen Uslu looks at the new-found ‘democratic confederalism’ of the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan

After perusing the programmes of the legal TKP and ÖDP, we will now take a look at the programme of the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK).

Contrary to the view of many, who regard the PKK as a nationalist guerrilla movement, at its inception the founding members of the PKK were not Kurdish nationalists - at least not in the sense that the term could be applied to several remarkable Kurdish organisations in Iraq and Turkey, first and foremost among them the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

The initial bunch of PKK leaders, including comrade Abdullah Öcalan, had their roots in the revolutionary Marxist organisations of the late 60s and early 70s. However, since its foundation the PKK has passed through several political and ideological bottlenecks resulting in a change of programme - among the Turkish left there is a tendency to despise such programme changes.

We must bear in mind that the PKK has been engaged in open warfare since 1985, and despite suffering heavy losses it has still maintained substantial support among the population of Kurdistan. Considering the frozen nature of the Turkish left’s positions on the national question, the PKK’s attempts to understand the rapidly changing realities of the region and adjust its programme accordingly is actually commendable.

Note. THE CPGB area minute ultra left sect in the UK, previously The Leninist tendency in the Communist Party, they have been linked to Trotskyist facts in Turkey. I decided to poublish it because it is quite an interesting take on the PKK